Richard Conniff's Blog, page 8

Hello, My Name is Denisova 11. And Mom Is SOOOO Weird. Or Is It Dad?

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Artist’s conception of a Neanderthal: This would be Denny’s mom.  (Photo: Joe McNally/National Geographic)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

In a remarkable twist in the story line of early human evolution, scientists have announced the discovery of “Denisova 11”—a female who was at least 13 years old, lived more than 50,000 years ago, and was the child of an early mixed marriage.

That is, her parents were not just of different races, but two different and now-extinct early human types. Their exact taxonomic designations—whether they were separate species or subspecies—is still a matter of scientific debate. But the bottom line for Denisova 11 is that mom was a Neandertal and dad a Denisovan.

The research, published Wednesday in Nature, is the work of a team led by pioneering paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He and his co-authors presented the first description of the Denisovans in 2010, based on genetic evidence from one of the 2,000 or so bone fragments found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains,

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The Telltale Bone, in 360 degrees (Photo Thomas Higham/Oxford University)

where Siberia borders Mongolia and China. The new discovery is based on another bone fragment from that lot, a 2.5-centimeter-long fragment of what was a femur or humerus, from which the researchers extracted six DNA samples and then cloned them for detailed analysis.

Molecular dating indicates that Denisovans, who are so far known only from Denisova Cave, and Neanderthals, known mainly from sites in Europe, diverged from each other almost 400,000 years ago. They coexisted, probably in relatively small populations scattered across the vast Eurasian landmass, until both became extinct some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

But the genetic evidence from Denisova 11 and other recent studies suggests that, on the occasions when they met, Denisovans and Neandertals commonly mated with each other—and with modern humans. Denisova 11’s father carried a small amount of Neandertal ancestry, the study notes, from “possibly as far back as 300 to 600 generations before his lifetime.”

Sharon Browning, a statistical geneticist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research, praises the new study. “I’m really kind of blown away by it,” she says. “Just to catch the offspring of these two different groups is really remarkable.”

“It looks absolutely solid,” adds University of Utah population geneticist Alan Rogers, who also was not part of the work. “I think these guys, as usual, have done a great job.” Asked if Denisova 11 might have simply been the offspring of a mixed Neandertal–Denisovan population—rather than of a mother and father of two such starkly separate backgrounds—Rogers says, “I felt that their analysis made sense. I was convinced by that. It’s not surprising that the two species would mate, if they were together at the same place and time,” he adds. “But I don’t think we knew before now that they were together at the same place and time—and if they were, it raises the question of why they were so different.” That is, why didn’t they evolve into a single species?

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View from Denisova Cave (Photo: Bence Viola, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

“It’s a really interesting question,” says Harvard University geneticist David Reich, who did not take part in Pääbo’s study. “At Denisova Cave we are clearly looking at an area where these two groups washed across one another, within walking distance of the cave. But there must have been a lot of isolation, as well as mixture.” The hybrid offspring from such divergent populations, Reich says, may have experienced biological problems. Or they may have faced cultural bias, Pääbo notes, if people of mixed backgrounds were “not very well accepted in the cultures of that time.”

Even so, both Neandertals and Denisovans have persisted in the modern human genome. A small percentage of Neandertal ancestry is common in all modern human populations outside Africa; some Denisovan lineage is also common among people from east Asia and Oceania. Earlier this year a study led by Browning indicated the modern Denisovan inheritance derives from at least two separate populations, suggesting they were once dispersed far beyond the Denisova Cave. Pääbo says the next step for his laboratory will be extracting DNA from sediment in the Denisova Cave floors to determine “just when Neandertals were there, when Denisovans were there and when both were there together.”

The dream that scientists could document such interactions in the prehistory of humankind “used to seem impossible,” Reich says. “But now we are getting to witness the dream.”

Utah Yields a Giant Triassic Pterosaur–and It’s Largely Intact

 

Here’s the press release from Brigham Young University. (Sorry, didn’t have time to add it earlier.)  And small correction: Pterodactyl(us) is just a name for one genus of pterosaur, rather than a common name for all pterosaurs.

When Brooks Britt, a geological sciences professor at BYU, searched through the latest Triassic sandstone samples in his lab, he expected to find bones of early crocodiles and dinosaurs. Instead, he discovered the bones of a new pterosaur specimen, now named Caelestiventus (heavenly wind) hanseni. Dating back more than 200 million years, it’s one of the earliest ever found.

Until Britt’s discovery, newly published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, there were only 30 known Triassic pterosaur (more commonly known as pterodactyl) specimens known to man — and none lived in deserts. Caelestiventus hanseni predates all desert pterosaurs by 65 million years. “We’re getting insights into the beginning of pterosaurs,” he said. “Ours shows that they’re extraordinarily diverse.”

Britt and his team were at the Saints and Sinners Quarry on BLM-managed land in northeastern Utah when they made the discovery. With so many bones at the site (more than 18,000 so far), Britt explained, the team extracts large blocks of sandstone blindly, not knowing what bones are in the blocks until they are carefully whittled down in the lab.

Back in Provo, Britt’s team found five skeletons of early crocodiles in one block before noticing there were several odd-looking bones as well. Those turned out to belong to the new pterosaur, which was unexpected, he said, “because Triassic pterosaurs are extraordinarily rare.”

With their delicate build, pterosaur bones are easily destroyed, making them rare in the fossil record. “Most pterosaur bones look like roadkill,” Britt explained.

The bones of Caelestiventus hanseni, however, are uncrushed and three-dimensional because they are preserved in sand, which cannot be compressed. “Most Triassic specimens consist of just a single bone: for example, a little phalanx from a finger or one vertebra from the neck,” Britt said. “For this animal, we have the sides of the face and the complete roof of the skull, including the brain case, complete lower jaws and part of the wing.”

The three-dimensional bones of Caelestiventus hanseni provide unrivaled insights into the evolution of the earliest pterosaurs, especially the skull. These insights include the muscles attached and the nature of the 112 or so teeth . Furthermore, the skull roof preserves the impression of the brain, which reveals that even early pterosaurs had a poor sense of smell and well-developed vision.

Britt’s team is working with Fabio Dalla Vecchia, a Triassic pterosaur expert associated with the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont in Sabadell, Spain. “When we first contacted [him] and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a three-dimensional pterosaur out here in Utah,’ he goes, ‘No, no, no… I don’t buy that.’ Then we sent him some three-dimensional images of the bones and it convinced him. Next thing you know, Fabio’s at BYU, working with us on this specimen.”

Caelestiventus hanseni is most closely related to Dimorphodon macronyx, known only from Lower Jurassic strata of Britain.  This indicates that the Dimorphodontidae originated in the latest Triassic and the lineage survived the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction event.

To access the journal article go here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0627

 

India’s The Tiger Capital of the World. Here’s How It Could Do 5X Better

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Sunderbans National Park, West Bengal, India (Photo: Soumyajit Nandy/ Wikimedia)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

Ullas Karanth, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, is one of the world’s premier tiger experts and a leader in the effort to restore India’s depleted tiger populations. Raised in the South India state of Karnataka, he has spent much of his professional life studying and working to bring back tigers there, starting in Nagarahole National Park in the foothills of the Western Ghats, and then across a 10,000-square-mile region of that mountain range.

Karanth’s emphasis on scientific methods has frequently brought him into conflict with India’s forest bureaucracy, particularly over its insistence on estimating tiger populations based on footprint counts. Karanth instead pioneered the use of camera traps for population estimates based on identification of individual tigers. That method belatedly became the national standard after a 2004 scandal, when Sariska Tiger Reserve, officially estimated to have 26 tigers, turned out to have none.

Karanth’s willingness to report illegal logging, cattle grazing, and poaching in protected areas — and to implicate corrupt officials in the damage — has also earned him enemies. In one incident, an angry mob set a fire that destroyed his car, laboratory, and eight square miles of forest. But Karanth’s persistence has helped reestablish the tiger population in the Western Ghats and fueled his ambition to see that success extended across India and to empty tiger habitat far beyond.

Yale Environment 360: India has managed to maintain a population of about 3,000 tigers for decades. What’s the potential population in a nation that’s also home to 1.3 billion people?

Ullas Karanth: There are at least 300,000 square kilometers of the type of forest in which tigers can live, which are still not converted to agriculture and which are under state ownership, protected as state-owned forest reserves. A subset of that, maybe 10 or 15 percent, is protected as wildlife reserves. So basically if all these 300,000 square kilometers were reasonably well protected and the prey base is brought up, we could have 10,000 to 15,000 tigers.

Conniff Is there any chance that that will happen?

Karanth: I don’t see why not. It’s essentially a function of

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Ullas Karanth

building back the prey base, because the forest cover is there. Some of the better-protected areas like Nagarahole and Bandipur national parks, where I worked, have densities of 10 to 15 tigers per 100 square kilometers. Even if we averaged only 5 tigers per 100 square kilometers in that 300,000 square kilometers, you’re talking about 15,000 tigers.

Conniff So why isn’t the prey base there already? Is it the bush meat trade?

Karanth: It’s not the bush meat trade in the sense that it’s hunted and sold in large markets, the kind of thing you see in Africa and in Laos and Burma. It is more hunting for consumption and selling to a few neighbors. Some of the most extensive forests are in central India, northeast India, eastern India, where there is very heavy illegal hunting of prey animals such as deer, antelopes, and wild pig by local people. So that’s where the scope for future recovery is tremendous. Up to now, the recovery of tigers has taken place in more fragmented forests in southwestern India and in parts of central India.

Conniff So if you got the prey base back into those larger areas, you could have connected corridors for tigers?

Karanth: We have a fair amount of connectivity even now. But these are actually large blocks of connected forests in central India and northeast India. They’re devoid of prey, and devoid of tigers for that reason. Fixing that requires tough enforcement and intelligent planning of major projects to maintain connectivity.

Conniff The current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to be more interested in running highways through tiger habitat than in protecting that habitat.

Karanth: Narendra Modi’s government has an agenda for rapid economic growth, and a fundamental part of that plan is to improve infrastructure projects. So it certainly has tried to accelerate the rate at which new infrastructure projects are being put in place. But it’s not that they haven’t put money into tigers. In fact, money into tiger conservation also has gone up.

Conniff Have you been able to stop proposed highway developments, like the one through the Pench Tiger Reserve, or the one in Corbett Tiger Reserve?

Karanth: It’s not one or two. There are dozens of cases. The problem is this: All the prime wildlife areas — tiger areas, let’s say — right now occupy 4 or 5 percent of the total national land area. So if you are putting in new highways, you can go around them. But the powerful arm of the government that’s in charge goes ahead and plans highways without giving any consideration for such options or for mitigating measures. Then the conservationists go to court and fight, because there are strong laws protecting nature, and the thing gets logjammed in court for 10 to 20 years. Then far too expensive mitigation measures are proposed. The lack of good science in all this is also a problem. I’m not saying every highway or every problem will be solved, but with innovation it is possible to avoid the courts.

Conniff We have this problem in the United States, too, obviously — putting human need and convenience ahead of the natural world. Is it possible to persuade people that you can have both, in India and the developing world?

Karanth: I take it as a given that poor people in India want to be lifted out of poverty. They see examples like China and other countries. To me, trying to resist that massive urge for a better life among poor people is not something practical. Urbanization and industrialization have other negative consequences, like mining and highways. But in the long run, conservationists should try to see how we can use urbanization and the economic growth process to protect nature; you lose somewhere, but where else can you gain? That is how we should do it.

If you look at it from the very macro view, when you have people moving off the land and away from occupations like livestock grazing, hunting for protein, using wood and forest products for fuel and markets, when you take these basic pressures off and concentrate people in urban areas, it does free up quite a bit of pressure on nature. It allows nature to expand. Conservationists should recognize this basic reality.

Conniff India actually pays for voluntary [village] relocations, particularly out of tiger habitat. But you also have organizations opposing that sort of thing, as a violation of human rights. What do you tell those people?

Karanth: Being truly fair, democratic, and voluntary is the key. If people really want to go, and if people get a better deal by moving out, I see nothing wrong with it. And in fact, now people are getting attracted to move by this process of urbanization and by the desire to access cell phones, highways, hospitals, schools, and other benefits, rather than remain in remote areas in the face of conflict with wildlife. We go to some of the remote areas, and you find only old people. All the young people have moved to towns and cities for different occupations. So that big pull is there, and we should take advantage of it.

Conniff India also has a large fund for this that it’s not spending, doesn’t it?

Karanth: Initially, we didn’t have the money to compensate people fairly. And that, to me, is critical. They have to be really well compensated and fairly treated. Now the money is there. Over the years, India has built up a massive fund known as CAMPA by collecting fines from large industrial, mining, highway, and other such projects to compensate for forest loss. However, there is great reluctance on the part of forest managers to spend that money on relocation. They want to spend it on all sorts of other things, including new tree plantations, as part of the so-called “Green India Mission,” bringing in bulldozers and often planting a single species. We have seen that most of these plantations have failed to benefit nature. There’s a substantial amount of corruption involved in all this. My point is this: If that same money goes into just removing the pressures — all the livestock and people from natural forests — recovery will take place. And wildlife will come back.

Conniff Tiger recovery is not just about India, although it seems that way most of the time. So what about the rest of Asia?

Karanth: In Southeast Asia, I would say Thailand has done the best job. They have very large blocks of forest and stable forest boundaries. They have a developed economy, so the subsistence pressures are not there on the scale of India. So if they stop hunting, tigers come back. I have seen this. Indonesia is struggling very hard, and Malaysia. But they have mostly rainforests, which are not as good [habitat] as the deciduous forest in central Thailand.

Conniff And Vietnam?

Karanth: Vietnam is very hard. It’s fragmented. The culture is so oriented to hunting and wildlife consumption, and the tigers are almost gone. Cambodia and Laos have extensive forests, but the enforcement machinery is not there, and they have lost their tigers.

Conniff And China has recently created new tiger protected areas in the northeast for the Siberian tiger.

Karanth: China is a very strange case. In the ’90s, they somehow identified the south China tiger as the tiger to be saved, and it was by then almost gone. So they spent a couple of decades banging their heads against a concrete wall to recover their Chinese tiger. Meanwhile, a few tigers from Russia were straggling over to northeast China, and we worked there, WCS [Wildlife Conservation Society] worked there, both in Russia and in northeast China, convincing them that this is where it would be worth making an effort. There is a resurgence of interest in nature in the younger generation and among academics, and I think it is that pressure, combined with the bad name China has got with the wildlife trade, but the result is that they have taken a serious decision to bring back tigers. And when they take a decision, they do things. They’re creating a 60,000-square-kilometer connected network of parks to bring back tigers in the northeast. From a dozen or so tigers at the start, there are certainly more than 20 to 30 there now. If they put in place what they have in mind now, the recovery is going to be quite spectacular.

Conniff Despite the global interest in tigers and the fundraising on their behalf, you argue that much of that money gets spent on bureaucracy and infrastructure and things like those plantations that you talked about. How can you get the money to actually protect tigers?

Karanth: This is a problem specific to India, excessive spending on a small number of areas. It’s not a universal problem. Many countries still need funds. They don’t have the infrastructure for protection. In India, I think the argument is that there should be economic efficiency. Somebody should audit these tiger reserves and say, “Why the hell does Nagarahole, which used to be managed with 20 million rupees, now get 20 or 30 times that annual budget?” Because the budgets are so big, the wrong type of people are coming there to spend it. There should be a model of where you spend, where you don’t spend. It’s now whims and fancies. Do you need a water hole every kilometer? Your aim is to protect nature in as intact a manner as possible, not create a Disneyland of some kind with all sorts of artificial manipulation of habitat, just because there is money for it.

Conniff You have been watching tigers for 40 years …

Karanth: Fifty.

Conniff So is there a story or a lesson that you would tell people from your experience to show them why tigers matter and why they should care about them?

Karanth: We come from nature, and we connect with nature, and losing this makes us poor emotionally, culturally, aesthetically. When I was a schoolboy, just getting into my teens, tigers were being slaughtered. Forests were being cleared, and in this whole landscape of 25,000 square kilometers in the Western Ghats, tigers were almost gone. There were probably less than 75 tigers in the whole landscape.

Today in the same landscape, there are more than 400 tigers. India’s economic growth rate has jumped from 3 percent to 7 percent. The number of people has probably quadrupled. There are 15 million people in that landscape. In agriculture, the daily wage of people has shot up from 2 or 3 rupees a day to 300 or 400 rupees a day. So there is increased prosperity. And there are more tigers. So why lose the tiger when you can do that instead? There’s a living example before me.

Acts of Gratitude: Remembering A Doctor’s Heroic Care

This morning I got word that Dr. Robert S. Modlinger, the endocrinologist who saved my life, has died at 72. Here is the obituary giving the considerable accomplishments of his career. But Bob Modlinger meant so much more than that to me and to so many other patients, despite his own disabling medical issues.

This is the column I wrote a few years ago to thank him.

BY RICHARD CONNIFF/The New York Times

JULY 5, 2007 6:53 PM

I’m too big a skeptic to put much faith in the circularity of life, with deeds done long ago coming round years later to haunt us or make us whole. But I began to think about the possibility recently, during a visit to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. One of the lectures that day was about the art of listening to patients’ stories with an almost literary ear, as a way of treating them with greater insight and sensitivity.

The speaker was looking at things only from the doctor’s perspective. But it struck me that there are at least two sides to every medical story. And it got me thinking back 30 years, to when I was a young man dying of no apparent cause.

My symptoms then included listlessness, faint-headedness, an inability to climb stairs without resting and unquenchable thirst. Twice, I took home a jug for a 24-hour urine test, and both times I came back with an extra bottle on the side. It didn’t seem to signify much to my doctor. The heart was his specialty, and he kept doing electrocardiograms suggesting something wrong there, but no particular diagnosis. I wasn’t much interested, in any case. I was only 26 years old, but the idea of dying seemed perfectly fine.



Then one afternoonon my parents’ front porch, I stood up in front of my father and briefly passed out. My parents arranged for me to see an endocrinologist named Robert Modlinger, who got hold of my ample test records, phoned me, and started to talk in a strangely unmodulated voice. His wife April was also on the line, repeating my answers to his questions so he could read her lips. I learned later that he’d gone deaf a decade earlier, in his mid-twenties, when he was a student in medical school. Finally, he said, “I want you to come into my office. I think you have Addison’s Disease.” It sounded more like, “I THINK you have AHHHH-dison’s Disease.”

The idea of a deaf man diagnosing my problem by phone, when a seeing, hearing physician had repeatedly failed to do so in person, has stuck in my head ever since as the Miracle of St. Modlinger.

I went to see him on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May when my blood pressure was 60 over 40. He spent three hours doing tests, asking questions, listening (that is, lip reading) and having the good sense to question more closely when my answers didn’t fit the evidence he was seeing. He confirmed that it was Addison’s Disease, a failure of the adrenal cortex that is fatal if untreated, and put me on the course of drugs I have taken ever since.

Within a day, I felt better, it seemed, than I had ever felt in my life. Within a few months, I was running five miles a day. I began to travel and to write articles, and later books, about the natural world, human behavior and other topics. In the years since, I have collected tarantulas in the Amazon, tracked leopards with !Kung San hunters in Namibia and trekked in the Himalayas of Bhutan in pursuit of tigers and a mythical beast called the migur. I remained Dr. Modlinger’s patient for years after the diagnosis, and he seemed to take vicarious delight in these far-flung adventures.

Eventually, though, I relocated, and we lost contact. My career in journalism gave me a garden for cultivating my native cynicism, and the business of making a living as a writer brought out an inclination to be blunt and not much good at social niceties. So when my oldest child announced a few years ago that he wanted to spend his life helping people, I said, “That’s a strange idea.” When he added, in college, that he had decided to become a doctor, I expressed horror.

“Think of the snot-nosed children,” I said. “Think of being stuck in an office seeing the digestive complaints, the migraine headaches, the depression, the vague symptoms of possibly imaginary origin.” I did not say, “Think about me on that Saturday afternoon in Dr. Modlinger’s office.”

In the face of this paternal discouragement, my son persisted, and it has been interesting to watch. He volunteered at a hospice and genuinely seemed to enjoy caring for people who were old, incontinent, terminal. I’d been telling him it was naïve, in modern medicine, to expect to get to know patients as much more than symptoms. Everything had become too impersonal. But then, by an odd coincidence, his childhood piano teacher showed up at the hospice and together they helped make her husband comfortable as he died.

I probably should have known that the stories of patients and the people who care for them can still circle together in strange ways. A few years ago, I looked up Dr. Modlinger to ask a question, and with April on the phone as always, he told me that on top of being deaf, he’d lost the vision in one eye and developed problems with his balance, forcing him to give up his practice while he was still in his 50s.

I expressed my sorrow. It seemed like a terrible loss, not least to his patients. And it seemed wrong that the doctor who had given me back my life should be losing the pieces of his. I thought gloomily of a book I used to read to my kids, Edward Gorey’s “The Dwindling Party,” in which the guests mysteriously vanish one by one.

When I phoned Dr. Modlinger again more recently, he was in a wheelchair. But he was also full of a characteristic quality of delight, bordering on ebullience. I reminded him of my miracle cure, and I could hear him beaming. “I must have been very good,” he said.

And he was. I thanked him for everything — that is, for keeping me alive long enough to marry, to travel, to write, to raise three fine children. In August, I told him, my son will become a medical student at Columbia.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. And the inexplicable note of happiness in his voice made me think that spending Saturday afternoons healing sick people might not be such a bad life, after all.

 

A Probiotic Vaccine Aims to Stop Cholera Epidemics Fast

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by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

The most terrifying things about cholera is its lethal speed. A victim can consume contaminated food or water, come down with diarrhea a day later and, if untreated, be dead a day after that—having inadvertently spread the microorganism to friends, neighbors and family members in the meantime. Hence cholera’s reputation for tearing explosively through populations, mostly recently in Haiti beginning in 2010 and Yemen in 2016.

Two major challenges—one diagnostic, the other preventive—make it difficult to stop cholera epidemics: A simple field test can distinguish cholera from other forms of diarrhea, but only after symptoms have already appeared. And although existing vaccines can prevent the disease, they require two or three weeks to elicit protective immunity. Neither diagnosis nor vaccination is fast enough for public health workers racing to stop the first few cases of cholera from breaking out into an epidemic.

Two new studies published this month in Science Translational Medicine could change that, although both are still in preliminary testing on animal models of cholera. In the first study researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to know “whether we could engineer a bacterium that could serve both to diagnose and prevent cholera,” says senior author James Collins. The researchers focused on Lactococcus lactis, which people have routinely consumed for thousands of years incultured dairy products like yogurt and sour cream.

The initial plan for treatment was to genetically engineer the bacterium “to produce and secrete antimicrobial peptides specific to cholera,” Collins says. But on attempting to culture L. lactis in a laboratory dish together with the cholera pathogen, he says, the researchers found to their “pleasant surprise” that no such engineering was needed: L. lactis “was either inhibiting or killing off the cholera” on its own. This was apparently because the lactic acid it secretes creates an inhospitable environment for the cholera pathogen in the petri dish—as it also presumably does in the small intestine. In testing on laboratory mice 84.6 percent of those fed L. lactis and the cholera pathogen together survived, compared with 45.7 percent of those fed the cholera pathogen alone. When the researchers experimentally altered L. lactis to stop it from producing lactic acid, this protective effect disappeared. It was, Collins says, the first time anyone has demonstrated the mechanism by which a probiotic—that is, a bacterium that confers a health benefit on its host—can prevent disease.

To turn the probiotic into a diagnostic tool, the researchers spliced in genes enabling L. lactis to detect the presence of cholera in the gut and “report” it, after relatively simple processing in the laboratory, by changing the color of the host’s stool sample. Collins conjectures that further refinements could bypass the need for laboratory processing. In the 47 countries where cholera is endemic—and in places like Haiti, where seasonal outbreaks are likely—people could in theory take the genetically altered probiotic for prevention, and could also get an early alert to cholera infection when the probiotic changes the color of their feces. Collins says his lab, which specializes in basic research on synthetic biology, is now looking to work with other partners focused on applied research to address questions of safety, effectiveness and cost.

The second Science Translational Medicine study describes a vaccine that appears to function unexpectedly—and almost immediately—as a probiotic against cholera. Researchers in Matthew Waldor’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School were developing a live, attenuated (that is, deliberately weakened) vaccine based on the highly virulent strain of cholera responsible for the Haiti outbreak. Turning the pathogen into the so–called HaitiV vaccine involved making nine different genetic alterations to minimize potential adverse reactions, remove the pathogen’s ability to produce the cholera toxin, and prevent the organism from becoming toxic again.

At that point, Waldor says, the standard practice would have been to give the vaccine to test animals, wait the usual two or three weeks for immunity to develop and then challenge the vaccine by injecting cholera. Instead, his doctoral student and co-author Troy Hubbard asked if he could try the cholera challenge just 24 hours after vaccination. He had a hunch the altered cholera organism in HaitiV might colonize the small intestine as rapidly as did the original cholera pathogen on which it was based. Hubbard was proposing, in effect, to defeat cholera by taking advantage of its own lethal speed. “That’s the great thing about having students,” Waldor says. “They come up with these new ideas.”

It appears to have worked, with the live weakened HaitiV bacteria colonizing the small intestine and thereby crowding out the wild cholera. In testing on rabbits, unprotected individuals injected with cholera were all dead after 18 hours—but those that had received the HaitiV vaccine 24 hours earlier were alive and well. More than half the vaccinated animals in a subsequent test showed no ill effects from cholera after 40 hours. The rest were slower to develop cholera symptoms, and the symptoms were milder. In human terms, Hubbard says, that translates into more time to get to the hospital. And because the medical treatment of cholera—replacing lost fluids—is extremely effective, that extra time can make the difference between life and death.

“If there’s a vaccine that provides both short-term protection via one mechanism and also provides long-term adaptive immunity, that would be a significant advance,” says Edward Ryan, an immunologist and cholera specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in either study. “This paper answers the first question, but it doesn’t say anything about the second.” Even so, he called both studies “very exciting.”

In a commentary published in Science Translational Medicine, Robert Hall, a microbiologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who did not take part in the new research, remarked that both studies “draw attention” to the intestine “as a competitive environment that can be manipulated to increase resistance to infection.” This could potentially reduce the need for antibiotics, Hall says, and thus minimize the risk of causing increased antibiotic resistance in cholera. The new idea of probiotic vaccines and carefully targeted probiotics could potentially lead to new ways of managing other bacterial infections as well, including Escherichia coli and Clostridium difficle, without relying on antibiotics.

The work on HaitiV also raises the question of whether Vaxchora, an existing live vaccine against cholera approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2016, might likewise produce an immediate probiotic resistance to cholera. If so, that might expand the use of the existing vaccine for short-term protection against cholera in an outbreak. Vaxchora has never been tested for that rapid effect because no one ever thought to test a vaccine in the days before immunity develops, Hall says. He cautions, however, that Vaxchora is based on an older cholera strain that may colonize less aggressively, possibly reducing its ability to outcompete wild cholera in the small intestine.

“The history of cholera is one of amazing scientific advances and great optimism,” Hall says. “But cholera is vicious and really punishes complacency. So it is really excellent that these research groups come up with creative new ideas. Having contingency plans for dealing with cholera is something we will be profoundly grateful for as cholera continues to spring its nasty surprises on us.”

Selling the Protected Area Myth (No Wildlife Need Apply)

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Chevron’s Gas Plant Being Built in a Class A Protected Area

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

It’s widely celebrated as one of the few success stories in the push to protect the wildlife we claim to love: Since the early 1990s, governments have roughly doubled the extent of natural areas under protection, with almost 15 percent of the terrestrial Earth and perhaps 5 percent of the oceans now set aside for wildlife. From 2004 to 2014, nations designated an astonishing 43,000 new protected areas.

These numbers are likely to increase, as the 168 nations that are signatories to the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity work to meet their target of 17 percent terrestrial and 10 percent marine protected area coverage by 2020. And at that point, even more ambitious targets should kick in.

So, hurrah, right?

Sadly, there are two big delusions at work here. The first is that designating protected areas is relatively easy (and with publicity bonus points for politicians), but hardly anyone seems to be bothering with the hard work of actually protecting them. Roughly a third of national parks, reserves, refuges and the like now face intense and increasing human pressure, according to a recent study in the journal Science.

It’s not just a familiar story of poor nations failing to train and properly equip rangers, according to the report’s senior author, James E. M. Watson, a conservation scientist at the University of Queensland. He points to Australia’s Barrow Island Marine Park, granted a wealthy nation’s highest level of protection because it is home to variety of rare mammals, reptiles, birds and invertebrates, many found nowhere else in the world. Even so, in 2003, said Mr. Watson, the government allowed construction and expansion of a vast energy complex there, supplied by more than 450 oil and natural gas wells — the Aussie counterpart to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “Other nations look at what’s happening in Australia and the United States, and they say, ‘Why should we bother?’ ” he said.

Governments that boast about their protected areas without actually protecting them, Mr. Watson said, are “selling a myth.” Even Unesco’s Natural World Heritage sites — supposedly the planet’s greatest natural treasures — have a human footprint closer on average to farmland than to wilderness, he notes. When Tanzania, for instance, wanted to dig a uranium mine in its vast and storied Selous Game Reserve, once home to the one of the world’s largest population of elephants, Unesco approved the 135-square mile project — and duly moved the Selous onto its list of endangered World Heritage sites.

So many protected areas now face development that there’s an acronym for it — Paddd, for protected area downgrading, downsizing and degazettement — and a website for keeping up on the bad news.

The second problem with protected areas is the result of a peculiar foible of the human mind: Politicians, like the rest of us, are suckers for numeric targets like the ones in the Convention on Biodiversity. These targets seem simple, objective, easily comparable from one place to the next, and inexpensive to measure. But the perverse outcome is that governments have ignored the convention’s admonition to protect areas “of particular importance to biodiversity” and instead focused almost entirely on maximizing acreage, according to a recent study in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The standard strategy is to designate protected areas in remote regions where the cost and the inconvenience to humans is minimal. Australia, for instance, has largely put protected areas in its vast central desert region, rather than in coastal areas where they would protect more threatened species — but also inconvenience more people. Likewise, Brazil in March designated new marine protected areas the size of France and the United Kingdom combined, but omitted near-shore areas where there’s a greater diversity of wildlife facing more immediate threats from human activity.

Writing about the Half-Earth Project, a bid by conservationists to keep half the planet “as wild and protected from human intervention or activity as possible,” E. O. Wilson cautioned that making decisions about which habitats to protect without a more complete knowledge of Earth’s existing species “would lead to irreversible mistakes.” But the authors of the Nature Ecology and Evolution study put it more tersely: Pretending to protect species based purely on the number of acres protected is like managing human health care based on the number of hospital beds, “irrespective of the presence of trained medical staff” or “whether patients live or die.”

Researchers who looked at the home ranges of more than 4,000 threatened birds, mammals and amphibians worldwide for a 2014 study found that protected areas miss 85 percent of them. Even if all 168 convention signatories meet their 2020 protected area targets, their acreage monomania means they’d still miss 84 percent of threatened species, says Oscar Venter, a conservation scientist at the University of Northern British Columbia and the lead author of that study. Is it any wonder, then, that species and subspecies continue to go extinct — the western black rhino in 2011, the Japanese river otter in 2012, the Formosan clouded leopard in 2013, the Bramble Cay melomys in 2016 — even as we celebrate our success stories?

“If we are going to take natural history seriously, and all the things our communities and our economies depend on from natural areas,” Mr. Venter said, “we have to start putting parks in the right places and managing them in the right way.” That will at times entail setting aside our profits and our precious convenience, and it may seem like a stretch to imagine our self-indulgent species ever acting on this reality. But the alternative is to spend our lives in a world increasingly without wildlife.

END

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles appear in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. His latest book is “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”

When We Protect “Umbrella Species,” Who Else Gets In Under The Umbrella?

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Sage-grouse (Photo: Dave Showalter)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

Conservationists often criticize state fish and game departments for focusing single-mindedly on one species to the detriment of everything else — for instance, improving habitat for elk, which then browse down habitat for songbirds. But what if conservationists — who don’t have that traditional hook-and-bullet mindset — nonetheless inadvertently do much the same thing?

That’s one implication of new research looking at the umbrella species concept, one of the fundamental ideas driving conservation efforts worldwide. It’s the idea routinely advocated by conservationists that establishing and managing protected areas for the benefit of one surrogate species — from gorillas to grizzly bears — will also indirectly benefit a host of other, less charismatic species sharing the same habitat. “The umbrella species concept is an appealing shortcut,” says Jason Carlisle, who conducted the research as a doctoral candidate at the University of Wyoming.  But the complications quickly pile up.

Across much of the American West, the greater sage grouse is one such umbrella species. It’s widely considered (but not officially listed as) an endangered species, with a population down from millions of individuals across 16 states and three Canadian provinces a century ago to fewer than 400,000 in a sharply reduced and fragmented range today.

In 2015, an unprecedented consortium of states, federal agencies, private landowners, industry, and environmentalists agreed to a painstakingly negotiated collaboration to protect the sage grouse and to make it an umbrella for 350 other “background” species in sagebrush habitat. Then, last August the Trump Administration threw out that Obama-era agreement and reopened sage grouse habitat on federal lands to additional mining, drilling, cattle grazing, and off-road vehicle use — all factors that helped imperil sage grouse in the first place.

In reality, Carlisle and his co-authors suggest, the protective umbrella created under the 2015 agreement should have been even larger, at least in Wyoming. The researchers mapped the extent of semi-protected habitat for sage grouse statewide and then overlaid that onto habitat maps for background species. According to the resulting report in the Journal of Wildlife Management, the proposed conservation umbrella would have protected only 82 percent of the state’s sage grouse population. For 52 background species of conservation concern, it was even worse: The umbrella covered as little as 0 to 63 percent of their habitat. Making the umbrella concept effective, that study concluded, requires far more careful consideration of “the characteristics of the umbrella species, the reserve delineated on its behalf, and the similarity of the umbrella species to its purported background species.”

The species that stand out to human eyes don’t always turn out to be the best umbrella species for their habitat.  In Florida’s longleaf pine forests, for instance, the red-cockaded woodpecker might seem like the natural umbrella species for establishing protected areas. It’s a “flagship” species in the sense that it has obvious charismatic appeal for engaging policy makers and the public. It’s also a “keystone” species, meaning that it has a positive influence on the structure or function of its ecosystem. But “flagship” and “keystone” don’t automatically add up to umbrella species. When researchers at the University of Florida applied a battery of ecological criteria to longleaf pine forests, they found that the gopher tortoise, another keystone species, provided a broader umbrella for threatened species in that habitat. Likewise, researchers in central Europe recently concluded that a list of 168 beetle species found on decaying wood would provide an effective umbrella for identifying and protecting relict stands of primeval forest.

Even a carefully chosen umbrella species can leave holes in coverage for certain background species. A past study of a plan to make grizzly bears an umbrella species in Idaho found, for instance, that birds, mammals, and amphibians would benefit as background species, but most reptiles wouldn’t. A study of East African nature reserves originally established to protect large mammals found mixed results for small mammals. Even so, author Tim Caro, a conservation biologist at the University of California at Davis, argued that umbrella species had been “an effective conservation shortcut perhaps because most reserves were initially large and could encompass substantial populations of background species.” The takeaway from all these studies: Umbrella effects are seldom as simple as they seem.

In their sage grouse research, Carlisle and his co-authors also looked beyond the question of whether a protected area established for an umbrella species covers the right habitat, or enough of it. In a separate study published in The Condor, they also asked a surprisingly uncommon question about conservation initiatives: How does a management practice intended to benefit an umbrella species affect other, non-target species in the same habitat?

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Sagebrush mowed (left) and unmoved (Photo: Jason Carlisle)

One common management treatment that’s intended to improve habitat for sage grouse is the removal of the sagebrush canopy by mowing or other means. The theory is that opening up dense, woody sagebrush stands encourages understory vegetation and insects, both consumed at certain stages in their development by sage grouse chicks. Carlisle and his co-authors didn’t focus on the proposed benefit to the sage grouse, though that’s a topic of increasing debate. (A 2017­­­ study by co-authors Kurt Smith and Jeffrey Beck found largely negative effects on sage grouse population.) Instead, they looked at changes in three “background species” of songbirds: Brewer’s sparrow and sage thrasher, both almost exclusively seen in sagebrush habitat, and vesper sparrow, commonly found in both sagebrush and grassland habitat.

The study area was a central Wyoming site within both state and federally designated priority habitat for sage grouse. The treatment — mowing sagebrush to a height of about 10 inches — took place in February 2014, before bird nesting season, and covered a patchy mosaic in a stand of sagebrush that was otherwise uncut. Carlisle and his co-authors surveyed the area before treatment and for two years after.

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Brewer’s sparrow (Photo: Tom Koerner/USFWS)

The result: A complete loss of nesting habitat for Brewer’s sparrow and sage thrasher in mowed patches. The mowing treatment also cut the overall abundance of sage thrashers in half. But vesper sparrows seemed to take advantage of the new habitat for nesting and became more abundant in mowed areas. The co-authors noted that the sagebrush could take decades to recover from the treatment — though the long-term effects on other sagebrush species are unknown. They also emphasized that the mowing treatment was only patchily distributed in their study area, adding that “our findings are not applicable to forms of high-intensity, uniform disturbance that result in wholesale conversion of large areas of sagebrush-steppe, including some forms of agricultural, exurban, and energy development.”

Too often when scientists talk about umbrella species, said Liba Pejchar, a Colorado State University conservation biologist who was not involved in the study, “we either make assumptions or are not explicit about the assumptions we are making.” Conservationists rarely ask — or answer — the question, “Is what’s good for one species also good for others in that ecosystem?” The real take home, she added, “is that we need to do the science to determine if there are going to be winners or losers. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things,” but scientists and society should go in understanding the potential tradeoffs.

Both Pejchar and Anna D. Chalfoun, a University of Wyoming wildlife ecologist and senior author on the sagebrush studies, also questioned some of the specific assumptions that went into the sage grouse umbrella species idea. “There seems to be a culture in the West that getting rid of sagebrush will somehow benefit some wildlife species,” said Chalfoun. “But really I think it might be a legacy of simultaneously benefiting ranching practices and then hoping it might benefit things like sage grouse. This idea that sage grouse are this benevolent umbrella for all the other species out there has been stated as fact by a lot of professionals — not biologists necessarily — and we thought that deserved some really vigorous study.”

Pejchar noted that sage grouse restoration programs in western Colorado also emphasize removal of sagebrush and piñon-juniper, another native species. “It’s something that they can quantify. They can say we cleared this many acres of juniper, or we removed the shrub cover in this many acres of habitat, and they can report back,” she said, with such actions presumably helping to fend off any eventual endangered species listing. “That’s my general sense for why some of these approaches may be attractive. Sometimes I think it might be easier to do small-scale habitat manipulations than it is to address some of the primary underlying drivers of decline.” Those include cattle grazing, mining, oil and gas drilling, wind energy development, off-road vehicle use, and real estate construction, all on former sage grouse habitat.

One other factor may also have motivated the enthusiasm of land managers for clearing sagebrush, said Mark Salvo of the conservation nonprofit, Defenders of Wildlife: The practice is good for mule deer and elk, both popular game species that also benefited from the 2015 agreement to protect the sage grouse and make it an umbrella for 350 other “background” species in sagebrush habitat. “Everybody was willing to support the plan, and give it a chance to work,” he said, before the Trump Administration threw it out.

The irony, said Salvo, is that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke went on this past March to order agencies to protect corridors and winter habitat — exactly as the Obama-era sage grouse agreement would have done — but this time only for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn. That is, in place of what Salvo called “a useful if imperfect umbrella species” concept of protection for entire ecosystems, we are back for now to the old-fashioned promotion of game species above all — and to hell with everything else.

END

Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. His latest book is “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”

 

Sniffing Out the Deadliest Disease on Earth

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Anopheles mosquito taking a blood meal.

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

One of the more disturbing things about parasites is their ability to manipulate the behavior of a host, sometimes to suicidal extremes.  The classic example is the liver fluke. It infects a ant as an intermediate host, then manipulates the ant to climb onto a blade of grass, where it is likelier to get eaten by the parasite’s definitive host, a cow or other grazing ruminant.

Over the past few years, scientists have come to recognize that something similar happens to humans under the influence of one of the deadliest pathogens in our history as a species:  The human Plasmodium parasite not only causes malaria, but also makes victims more attractive to mosquitoes, which then transmit the parasite to other victims with every bite. New research suggests, however, that this manipulative behavior couldmake it easier to identify and treat carriers who now elude medical detection.  That could spell the potential demise of the parasite, which has killed hundreds of millions of people over the millennia, including 445,000 in 2016.

The research, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, characterizes the distinctive profile of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs)—chemicals often perceived as smells–produced by people infected with the Plasmodium parasite. That is, the researchers identify the odor of malaria—the stuff the mosquitoes are smelling–and propose developing new odor-based technology to detect malaria with far greater accuracy than any method currently available, even in patients who show no symptoms.

A research team led by Mark C. Mescher, a behavioral ecologist at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), tested the approach on 400 children at 41 schools in malarial areas near Lake Victoria in western Kenya.  The scientists used a portable, briefcase-size device that pulls air from the surface of the skin and collects VOCs in a filter, for later laboratory analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.  At the same time, they took blood samples for testing by two conventional but quicker methods–examination under a microscope, or screening for antigens with a rapid diagnostic test. The researchers provided treatment for children who tested positive.

But both of those methods, and even molecular analysis, fail to diagnose many cases where people infected with the Plasmodium parasite are partially immune or otherwise show no symptoms of disease. These undetected carriers still have the odor profile of malaria, meaning they are more likely to attract mosquitoes and pass the disease along to their neighbors. And this “hidden reservoir” of infection may account for “up to 90 percent of onward transmission” by mosquitoes, according to the new study.  That’s a major reason malaria continues to kill so many people, especially children in sub-Saharan Africa. Using the odor profile, on the other hand, “identified asymptomatic infections with 100 percent sensitivity,” the study says, suggesting “significant potential for the development of a robust noninvasive method for detecting malaria infections under field conditions.”

If other studies replicate these findings, malaria would join a growing list of diseases with known odor profiles, including asthma, tuberculosis, diabetes, and numerous cancers, as well as diseases of the teeth, gut, heart, liver, and kidneys.  Moreover, the new research comes at a time of increasing commercial and medical interest in developing practical tools for detecting and diagnosing these odor profiles in a timely way.

“I’m not sure it’s a huge leap to make this practical in the field,” says co-author Andrew F. Read, an evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University, adding that a breathalyzer-style device might speed detection of hidden carriers and thus hasten elimination of malaria from areas where it is now endemic. The Gates Foundation, which funded the new research, has made not just local elimination but worldwide eradication of malaria one of its stated goals.

Read cautions that the new study is based on only a single population. “The question is how variable this is around the world. Is it the same profile for people with different diets, different lifestyles? We don’t know if we need to fine-tune the profile for different countries.” But he adds that mosquitoes everywhere seem to cue into something about malaria, “and that suggests it’s the same signal all around the world.”

“It’s really, really interesting” work, says James A. Covington, who works on odor-based medical detection devices at the University of Warwick, and who wasn’t involved in the new research. But he suggests a larger caveat: “The range of chemicals” identified in the new study “are ones that I have seen before for other diseases.” So they might just be the body’s way of saying “I am ill, I am under stress,” rather than, “I have malaria.” The study would have been more persuasive, he says, if it had compared malaria victims with people suffering from another illness, rather than using healthy children as a control group.

But Sabine Dittrich, a public health microbiologist at the Geneva-based Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, who also was not involved in the research, calls it an impressive start. “If they have data from 400 children in Kenya, that’s obviously very exciting, 400 is a significant number,” she says. The possibility of a noninvasive device to test for malaria “would obviously make it easier to reach more people,” she says, and that is “extremely important” for finding and treating people who are acting as reservoirs of the parasite.

Eric Halsey, a tropical disease physician with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Malaria Branch, who also was not part of the new study, adds one final caveat:  Current malaria programs often fail to reach even the obvious symptomatic cases.  Having just returned last week from southern Africa, Halsey says the existing diagnosis and treatment technologies are perennially in short supply in the “poorest of poor” areas, and training programs for health care centers and for community volunteers is inadequate.  The World Health Organization reports that the $2.7 billion 2016 global investment in the fight against malaria was less than half the $6.5 billion needed to reach targets for malaria control.  “Promising research and new tools are always welcome in the malaria field,” says Halsey.  But the important thing is to put the tools we already have at hand to work.

END

Richard Conniff is the author of “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth,” and other books.

Dawn of The Flying Murder Heads

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The bristling teeth of Anhanguera piscator were for snagging fish. (Photo: Robert Clark)

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By Richard Conniff/National Geographic

Heading out into the geological layer cake of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, British pterosaur researcher Dave Martill proposes a “to do” list for this brief reconnaissance: 1.) Find a rattlesnake to admire. 2.) “Find a complete Quetzalcoatlus skull sitting on the ground.” The odds are almost infinitely better for item one.  But he and Nizar Ibrahim, a fellow paleontologist, promptly fall into a detailed discussion about how to obtain a research permit in the event of item two.

This is the first rule of pterosaur research: You need to be an optimist. Thinking you will go out on a given day and find any trace of pterosaurs—the winged dragons that ruled Mesozoic skies for 162 million years–is like buying a Powerball ticket and expecting to win. Pterosaur fossils are vanishingly rare. Their whole splendid world, built on hollow bones with paper-thin walls, has long since collapsed into dust. Scarcity is especially the rule for Quetzalcoatlus northropi, thought to be one of the largest flying animals that ever lived, nearly as tall as a giraffe, with a 35-foot wingspan, and a likely penchant for picking off baby dinosaurs.  It’s known from a few fragments discovered at Big Bend in 1971, and not much else.

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Ibrahim and Martill at Big Bend (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Martill and Ibrahim spend three arkays bone-hunting among the fissured hillsides. They cross and re-cross the promisingly named “Pterodactyl Ridge,” frequently consulting the “x-marks-the-spot” on maps left by the discoverer of Quetzalcoatlus. They decipher the nuances of geological strata (“Look at that Malinkovitch-controlled cyclicity!” Martill exclaims, referring to the way the Earth’s shifting movements show up in the rock), and they conjure up forgotten worlds. On a sandstone ridge with no obvious way down, Martill remarks, “Haven’t found a mountain yet we can’t fall down,” plunges forward, and emerges unscathed below, eyes fixed on the passing landscape.

They do not, however, stumble across any rattlesnakes, nor even the faintest whiff of a pterosaur. The femur of an Alamosaurus, the largest North American dinosaur that ever lived, turns up, by way of consolation. But dinosaurs are not pterosaurs, or vice versa. Leaving the park, the two paleontologists are already mapping out a return search for Quetzalcoatlus, permanently hooked on the tantalizing pterosaur mix of extreme biological richness glimpsed through the rarest of fossil remains.

##

Optimism against all odds has, however, lately begun to look almost reasonable in pterosaur research, with a rush of discoveries revealing

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Life-size model of Quetzalcoatlus Northrop (Photo: Robert Clark)

surprising new shapes, sizes, and behaviors. Some paleontologists now suspect that hundreds of pterosaur species may have lived at any one time, dividing up habitats much as modern birds do. Their world wasn’t just about monsters like Quetzalcoatlus, but also about pterosaurs the size of sparrows that flitted through primeval forests and fed on insects, pterosaurs that stayed on the wing across oceans for days at a time like albatrosses, and pterosaurs that just stood in briny shallows and filter-fed like pink flamingoes.

The recent discoveries have included not just clutches of eggs, but a community of them, with a new study from China reporting 200 eggs together, and evidence that pterosaurs may have returned to the same nesting site over hundreds of thousands of years.  (To put this in perspective, until 2014, just three eggs were known from more than two centuries of pterosaur science.) CT scans of intact eggs have revealed the world of embryos inside the shell and helped to explain how the hatchlings developed.  One egg even turned up in the oviduct of a Darwinopterus pterosaur from China, along with another egg apparently pushed out by the impact that killed her. “Mrs. T” (for Mrs. Pterosaur) thus became the first pterosaur indisputably identified by gender. Because she lacked a head crest, while many other Darwinopterus have them, she also provided the first solid evidence that for some pterosaurs, as for some modern birds, big, brightly colored crests probably functioned as a male sexual display device. These discoveries have given pterosaurs a vivid new life as real animals. They’ve also given paleontologists an insatiable appetite for more.

But apart from paleontologists, hardly anyone else seems to have noticed: Most people still respond to the word “pterosaurs” with a puzzled expression, until you add “like pterodactyls.” That’s the common name given to the first pterosaur discovered in the eighteenth century.  Scientists have since described more than 200 pterosaur species, but popular notions about pterosaurs have remained stuck: We almost invariably imagine them as pointy-headed, leather-winged, clumsily aerial reptilians, with murderous proclivities.

Habib, who works at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, set out to reconsider pterosaur biomechanics, combining an intensely mathematical approach with hands-on anatomical knowledge from his other job: teaching in the human cadaver lab at the University of Southern California medical school. (“I need to dissect something,” he explains, “and you can’t dissect a pterosaur.”)

Like most researchers, Habib figures the first pterosaurs emerged roughly 230 million years ago from light, strong reptiles adapted for running and leaping after prey.  Jumping—to catch an insect or dodge a predator–evolved into “jumping and not coming down for a while,” Habib theorizes.  Pterosaurs probably glided at first. And then, tens of millions of years before birds or bats, they became the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight.

With the help of aeronautical equations that they applied for the first time to biology, Habib and his fellow biomechanists dismissed the cliff-hanging hypothesis. They also demonstrated that taking off from land with an upright, bipedal stance, as other researchers had proposed, would have shattered the femurs of larger species.  Launching from a four-point stance made more sense, says Habib. “You want to get over the forelimbs and punch up into the air, like a pole-vaulter.” To take off from water, on the other hand, marine pterosaurs used their wings like paddles to push off the surface and flap into the air “like Michael Phelps doing a butterfly stroke,” Habib says.  And like Phelps, they had big, muscular shoulders—often combined with “freakishly small feet” on their hind limbs to minimize drag.

Pterosaur wings consist of a membrane attached to each flank from shoulder to ankle, and held out by a spectacularly elongated fourth finger running along the wing’s leading edge. Beautifully preserved specimens from Brazil and Germany revealed that the wing membrane was threaded with muscles and blood vessels, and reinforced with fibrous cords.

Researchers now think pterosaurs could make subtle adjustments to the shape of the wings in different flight conditions by contracting the wing muscles or by moving their ankles in and out.  Changing the angle of a wrist bone called the pteroid may have given them the equivalent of the leading edge slats on a passenger jet, for increased lift at low speeds. Pterosaurs also devoted more muscle to the business of flying, and a larger proportion of their body weight, than do birds, and a larger proportion of their body weight. Even their brains appear to have evolved for flight, with enlarged lobes for processing complex sensory data from the wing membrane.

The result is that pterosaurs have begun to look less like a train wreck in the sky and more like sophisticated aviators.  Many species appear to have evolved for flying slowly but with great efficiency for long distances and for soaring on the weak thermals over oceans. A few may even have been “hyper-aerial,” according to Habib.  For instance, Nyctosaurus, an albatross-like marine pterosaur with a nine-foot wingspan, had a glide ratio—the distance it could travel forward for every meter of drop—“well within the range of a modern sailplane, things that we have manufactured to be high-efficiency soaring planes,” says Habib.

“OK, the wing stuff is good,” a paleontologist remarked after a recent talk by Habib. “But what is up those heads?” Quetzalcoatlus, for instance, is thought to have had a skull up to ten feet long on a torso a quarter of that length. Nyctosaurus had an outsize head, plus a huge mast sticking out of the top, possibly with a crest attached. It looks like something Dr. Seuss invented.

Habib’s reply has to do partly with pterosaur brains, which added minimal weight to those huge heads.  It also has to do with pterosaur bones, which were hollow, like bird bones, only more so.  The bone walls were just a fraction of an inch thick, made of crisscrossing, laminated layers to resist bending and breaking—some researchers call them “plywood bones”–and they had struts across the hollow middle, to prevent buckling.  That allowed pterosaurs to balloon out the bone, expanding certain anatomical features without adding much weight.

Their skulls, ornamented with crests and keels, and those great, gaping mouths, thus achieved proportions Habib calls “ridiculous,” even “stupid.” It has led him to a sort of Big Bad Wolf hypothesis: “A big head gives you a big mouth, which is good for eating things,” he says.  “And a big head is good for sexual display.” Pterosaurs, he told his questioner at that talk, “were giant flying murder heads.”

##

On a busy street in downtown Jinzhou, a commercial hub for northeastern China, an SUV pulls over to the curb and a couple of paleontologists pile out. They head into an ordinary office building, up the stairs, and uncertainly down dimly lit hallways, ending up on the third floor, in the office of the director of the Jinzhou Paleontological Museum.  A large artillery shell stands against one wall, and there’s not much else obviously paleontological about the place, except for the presence on the couch of Junchang Lü, a gangling figure with an easy grin, dressed for fieldwork in gray slacks and a red windbreaker.

Lü, who’s on a flying visit from Beijing, follows the museum director down another darkened hallway.  The door of a windowless little storage room swings open to reveal what would be any other museum’s star attractions: slabs of stone containing exquisitely detailed fossils of feathered dinosaurs, primitive birds, and especially pterosaurs, covering every inch of shelf and most of the floor.

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Fossil treasure room in Jinzhou

Propped against the back wall, a slab that comes almost up to Lü’s shoulder displays an alarmingly large pterosaur, a Zhenyuanopterus, with a 13-foot wingspan and tiny chicken feet on its hind legs. The long, thin head, turned to one side, is all basket mouth, a cross-stitching of needle teeth that become longer and overlap out at the killing end. For catching fish while swimming on the surface, says Lü. It’s one of almost 30 pterosaur species he has described since 2001, with others still awaiting scientific recognition on the shelves.

The Jinzhou museum turns out to be one of ten or so such fossil museums scattered around Liaoning Province, the motherlode of modern pterosaur discovery and part of China’s recent rise to the forefront of fossil hunting.  Other paleontologists whisper that it’s also the Wild West, with enterprising farmers doing much of the collecting, to the detriment of scientific research. Commercial collectors often buy up prize specimens to sell illegally into the international trade.

In addition, Liaoning is also the main collecting site in a rivalry outsiders liken, a little unfairly, to the notorious nineteenth-century “Bone Wars” combat between pioneering American paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.  This rivalry pits Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences against Xiaolin Wang, whose specimen-crammed office is at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing. Like Marsh and Cope, the two worked together in the beginning, then went their separate ways in a spirit of muted hostility. (“One mountain cannot contain two tigers,” says Shunxing Jiang, a paleontologist who works at IVPP. It is proverbial.)

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Hamipterus eggs

In the 16 years since then, each has repeatedly one-upped the other, producing a combined total of more than 50 new pterosaur species—almost a quarter of all known pterosaurs–often with headline-making details, from Lü’s “Mrs. T” to Wang’s 200 Hamipterus eggs. Some of those species will perhaps turn out to be invalid, as happens after every great burst of paleontological discovery: New evidence, or further study, may reveal, for instance, that a supposed new species is really just the adult form of a species someone else has already described based on a juvenile specimen. But each side also has many more discoveries still to come.

“They’d have to work 9 to 5 for 10 years” to describe what they already have on hand, an outsider remarks, enviously. Hearing this, Jiang lifts his eyebrows, a little anxiously, and says, “I think ten years is not enough.”

The Bone Wars comparison is, however, a stretch, given the in-fighting that’s common in this contentious, esoteric field. “We’re a very small group, and we don’t really get along,” one pterosaur specialist remarks. The field, says another, “has a reputation for people who viciously despise one another.” Pterosaur researcher A will readily volunteer that B is “a waste of carbon,” while C independently remarks of A that certain people “would happily see him at the bottom of the ocean.” North American D meanwhile “doesn’t like anybody very much.”  Their combat is a natural byproduct of all those optimistic hypotheses built on fragmentary evidence. And it makes the Chinese rivalry look like a tea part. Lü shrugs off talk of mutual loathing, and Wang manages to avoid talking about it at all.

Their success, in any case, probably has as much to do with being in the right place at the right time as with competition:  China is one of just five places in the world—together with Germany, Brazil, the United States, and England–that have produced 90 percent of all pterosaur fossils.  That’s not because those five were the only places pterosaurs existed in such diversity and abundance.  Fragmentary fossils have turned up almost everywhere, even in Antarctica.  Instead, paleontologists think the pterosaur diversity that used to exist everywhere else is simply better preserved there, by some quirk of geology.

This is nowhere more beautifully true than in Liaoning.  In the early Cretaceous, says Lü, Liaoning’s temperate forests and shallow freshwater lakes supported a rich ecological community, including dinosaurs, early birds, and a large variety of pterosaurs.  Violent storms and ashy volcanic eruptions now and then killed some animals suddenly and in large numbers, perhaps slamming them out of the air onto the mudflats.  These catastrophic events buried the victims quickly, sometimes anaerobically, with sediments that have preserved specimens intact and in fine detail for more than 100 million years. Paleontologists call such sites “lagerstätte,” from the German meaning roughly a “storehouse” of lost life.

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Slab fossil from Liaoning

The results now turn up on hilly farms and eroding cliff faces all over Liaoning.  They don’t look like much at first, a slab with a hint or two of bone. But after a preparator working at a microscope has meticulously removed eons of hardened crud, they begin to take shape again.  To a beginner’s eye, they look as if someone has played pick-up-sticks with an odd assortment of lizard skulls and walking poles. Or as if Wile E. Coyote has gone off a ski slope and gotten squashed flat beneath a huge boulder Road Runner pushed down just behind him:  Legs akimbo, mouth agape, head pulled back by the contraction of powerful neck and back muscles, long, bony wing fingers all higgledy-piggledy askew.

When you look at them one after another, though—at, say, the Beipiao Pterosaur Museum, or at a recent pterosaur show at the Beijing Natural History Museum–the fossils begin to make sense as individual species, in all their former diversity.  There’s a widemouthed, frog-faced pterosaur named Jeholopterus (also known as the “Cookie Monster” pterosaur), thought to have snapped up dragonflies and other insects in ancient forests.  There’s Ikrandraco, named for the aerial mountain banshees in the movie “Avatar” and thought to have flown low over the water, using a sort of keel on its lower jaw to skim beneath the surface for fish.  There’s Dsungaripterus, from northwestern China, with a long, thin, upturned beak, for probing for shellfish and other invertebrates, to be crushed up by its knobby molars.

The sight of so many weapons, so much hunger, such vibrant life now frozen in stone, is unmistakably poignant. Something about pterosaurs ultimately made them vulnerable.  Maybe the food they depended on vanished during the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Or maybe their evolution to increasingly gigantic size left the likes of Quetzalcoatlus vulnerable, whereas some smaller birds and bats could hide out during the catastrophe. For pterosaurs, in any case, it was the end-time.

But as you study their beautifully-preserved remains in a museum, something peculiar happens:  You start to wonder if Nemicolopterus, a little insect eater, is sidling off the edge of its piece of shale, as if in pursuit of missing body parts. You wonder if you just saw the toe bones of Kungpengopterus, dark brown and standing out on the rock surface like embossed lettering, begin to twitch.  By a trick of the eye or the mind, it can seem–at least momentarily–as if the pterosaurs, this bizarre and bountiful expression of the great driving life force of the planet Earth, might yet rise up from the rock and again take wing.

END

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Ramphorhynchus and fish collision (Photo: Helmut Tischlinger)

Montana Wants to Save A Dino-Era Fish from Federally-Induced Extinction

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Pallid sturgeon

UPDATE: The fate of the pallid sturgeon–an American species that’s been with us since the age of dinosaurs–now depends on a judge’s decision about a dam replacement plan that would effectively consign it to extinction.  That decision is due soon, and today, in a poll by Defenders of Wildlife, 81 percent of Montana residents (and 73 percent of Republicans) indicated that they support efforts to protect the pallid sturgeon.  With the hope that the judge will hear those voices, I’m re-printing this story about the fight to save the pallid sturgeon.

by Richard Conniff

“We should be grandfathered in.” That’s how the manager of the Lower Yellowstone Project irrigation district in Montana put it. His farmers have been using a dam on the river to supply water to their fields since time immemorial—or for 112 years, anyway—and see no reason to change. But the pallid sturgeon would certainly say it should be grandfathered in too. The monster fish has depended on the river for 78 million years, roughly since Tyrannosaurus rex ruled this region.

The problem is that the farmers and their timber-and-rock dam are now

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Intake dam (Photo: LARRY MAYER/Billings Gazette)

killing off the sturgeon. Intake Dam is an unimpressive structure, located near Glendive, Montana, just before the Yellowstone River joins up with the Missouri River. The dam—really just a weir—stretches for 700 feet across the Yellowstone but does not even rise above the water surface in some seasons. The irrigation district has to pile on new stones each year just to make it back up enough water for its purposes.

So the Intake is easy to overlook—and allows some people to celebrate the 692-mile-long Yellowstone as “the longest undammed river” in the Lower 48. But the dam blocks off 165 miles of upstream habitat that the sturgeon would otherwise use for spawning. Because of that, only about 125 pallid sturgeon survive in the entire Upper Missouri River region. They are magnificent fish, up to five feet long and 85 pounds, that can live for as long as a century. But these fish, the largest wild population of pallid sturgeon in the country, have not reproduced successfully in about 60 years.

Even if the sturgeon manage to get together in the absence of their old spawning grounds, their young now just drift downstream into the Missouri River, where they die in the oxygen-deprived waters of a lake backed up behind another dam, built in 1956. So the pallid sturgeon—one of eight sturgeon species in North America—has been on the endangered species list since 1990, with no sign of recovery.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers, which built the dams that are largely responsible for endangering the pallid sturgeon and many other species, is apparently determined to build yet another dam, replacing the wood-and-stone structure at Intake with concrete, at a cost of $60 million. It has proposed moving the pallid sturgeon around the new dam with a two-mile bypass, though many fishery biologists have said that would never work. When Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a suit to stop the project in 2015, even the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks joined in with an amicus brief. A federal judge granted an injunction to delay the project, and the Army Corps is now scheduled to deliver a revised Environmental Impact Statement at the beginning of July, followed by a public comment period. Depending on that EIS and the outcome of the lawsuit, the dam project could move forward as early as next year. Or the dam could come down and give the sturgeon back their old breeding grounds before it’s too late.

“We believed we had to step in to stop this terrible project,” said Jonathan Proctor, the Rockies and Plains program director at Defenders of Wildlife. The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the operation of dams and irrigation programs, should “open the river and deliver the water to the farmers by alternative means,” he said. Knocking down the dam and replacing it with pumping stations could do the job, he added, while also protecting the sturgeon. Adding wind power to run the stations would avoid hitting the farmers with a big electric bill. Conservation measures would also help, as the irrigation district now loses 66 percent of the water it pulls from the river through seepage, evaporation, spillage, or otherwise.

What Proctor did not mention is that the whole project serves the needs of a relative handful of farmers, mainly growing sugar beets on 56,000 acres of otherwise arid land. And sugar beet production is dependent on another, considerably larger federal handout, a subsidy program that The Wall Street Journal recently characterized as “an egregious business welfare scheme.” Both directly and by its indirect effects on the market, that program has cost the nation an estimated $15 billion since 2008 and 120,0000 jobs since 1997. Those estimates come from the Coalition for Sugar Reform, which largely represents business interests, so we should take them with a grain of salt, not sugar. Even so, the subsidies—$300 million in 2013 alone—dwarf the pittance the federal government has spent defending the pallid sturgeon. And yet the sturgeon, not the sugar beet, is our true heritage as Americans.

But let’s set that aside. Defenders of Wildlife would prefer to just say it’s possible to have a “win-win” on the Yellowstone River, with both the farmers and the sturgeon getting the water they need. But for that to happen, our “longest undammed river” must actually be undammed. You’ll have to wait till July to comment on the Army Corps’ revised assessment, but there’s no harm in making your voice heard about this issue now, loudly and often.

Go here to send a note to the Army Corps of Engineers (choose “Executive Office” and address your note to Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick) or here for the Bureau of Reclamation. Feel free to play the emotional angle: “Your children want you to let the pallid sturgeon live.” Or just get right to the point: “Intake Dam must come down.”

END

And here’s the press release from Defenders of Wildlife:

A new Tulchin Research poll finds that Montana voters strongly support efforts to protect the endangered pallid sturgeon native to the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and back the approach favored by leading fishery scientists and conservationists over the existing plan being pursued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. By a margin of nearly 2-to-1, Montana voters support helping the pallid sturgeon population recover by removing the existing Intake Diversion Dam and installing irrigation pumps to allow the fish to swim up and downstream instead of the Corps’ plan to build a higher dam and a bypass channel that scientists are not confident the fish will use. Here we present key research findings.

Montana Voters Overwhelmingly Support Pallid Sturgeon Protection

The pallid sturgeon, which has existed since the dinosaur era and is one of the most rare and ancient fish in the United States, is well known to Montanans (90% ID). Voters feel very positively about pallid sturgeon (58% total favorable to 3% total unfavorable) and overwhelmingly support efforts to protect the fish, which is listed under the Endangered Species Act. More than 8 in 10 Montana voters (81%) back efforts to protect pallid sturgeon, including nearly half (46%) who strongly support these efforts.

Montana Voters Strongly Support Efforts to Protect Pallid Sturgeon

“Do you support or oppose efforts to protect the pallid sturgeon, a fish native to the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers?”

Total Support

81%

Total Oppose

8%

Undecided

12%

Support – Oppose

+73

Support for protecting pallid sturgeon extends across the political spectrum and includes strong majorities of Democrats (93% support), independents (82% support), and Republicans (73% support). Support for protection efforts also extends across the state, with some of the strongest support coming from the area neighboring the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, including the Billings media market (83% support) and Yellowstone County (88% support), which includes a large portion of the Yellowstone River watershed.